Elsa Porges was born in Vienna, a daughter of
Heinrich Porges (a close friend of
Richard Wagner). At the age of ten, at her own insistence, she attended the first complete, four-opera performance of
The Ring Cycle in
Bayreuth in 1876, for which her father served as Wagner's special documentary-archivist. In opera tradition, Elsa is considered to have been the cycle's youngest audience member. With her marriage to journalist
Max Bernstein, she became hostess to one of the most notable musical and literary
salons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At various times, attendees included
Gerhart Hauptmann (whose son married Bernstein's daughter, Eva),
Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Engelbert Humperdinck,
Henrik Ibsen,
Annette Kolb,
Hermann Levi,
Alma and
Gustav Mahler,
Thomas Mann,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Richard Strauss,
Bruno Walter, and
Max Weber, among many others. She was educated at
Munich and for a short time, also was on the stage. A degenerative
affliction of the
eyes forced her to retire. Thenceforth she devoted herself to
dramatic literature. Shortly after her marriage in 1892 to
Max Bernstein, she wrote her first play,
Wir Drei (English: "We Three"), which created considerable discussion; some saw it as a dramatization of the matrimonial and
sexual views of
Taine and
Zola. (Although written under the pseudonym of Ernst Rosmer, her identity as the author of the play was never secret.) Her next few plays fell short of exciting the same public attention:
Dämmerung ("Twilight", 1893);
Die Mutter Maria, 1894;
Tedeum (1896);
Themistokles (1897); and
Daguy Peters. Unbounded admiration was elicited by
Königskinder (1895), a dramatic fairy-tale, however. Although its plot was simple, the beauty of the
theme and its poetry were such as to class it with
Ludwig Fulda's
Der Talisman. Although
Engelbert Humperdinck was dissatisfied with his first concert setting of
Königskinder in 1897, an avant-garde
melodrama that demanded an innovative "
speak-singing" technique from its soloists (despite production challenges, it nevertheless enjoyed more than 120 performances across Europe), he persuaded Bernstein, in 1907, to authorize a traditional opera setting that debuted in German at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York in December 1910. That version is still performed. Almost certainly at the instigation of
Winifred Wagner, Bernstein was awarded an exit visa for the United States in 1941, but refused to leave her sister Gabriele behind (who like Elsa had lost almost all her eyesight) as she had become her caretaker. Being of Jewish heritage, the two women were transported to
Dachau arriving on 25 June 1942, where Bernstein was recognized as the prominent author of
Königskinder. As a result, the sisters were sent the following day to
Theresienstadt. Gabriele died while they were imprisoned there. Bernstein is listed among those prisoners whose works are noted in the
Theresienstadt Papers. After her liberation in 1945, Elsa Bernstein used a special typewriter for the blind to write a detailed account of her confinement in the camp's
Prominentenhaus, or
House of Notables. More than five decades after her death, the typescript was discovered by accident and published in German under the title of,
Das Leben als Drama. Erinnerungen an Theresienstadt. ==Death==